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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

That seems like a shallow dismissal. In a distributed system, making sure that sub requests are handled across distributed nodes within the local AZ, and correctly draining traffic from AZs with partial component service outages, is not as trivial as 'using a feature built in to a load balancer'.

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It may be shallow, but architecting for this is not really "advanced, FAANG-only accessible methodology". I'm surprised their services have been as "reliable" as they have been considering such trivial stuff is just now being employed in their architecture.

Half the complaints on here on architecture posts are 'you don't need this kind of stuff unless you're at FAANG scale'. Now we have a write up of something that's accessible to businesses at non-FAAANG scale, and we have the new complaint, that this kind of stuff isn't worthy of FAANG-scale architecture.

Geo traffic distribution, multi regions/AZs with functionality to weight and drain traffic should be used in most SaaS services where a simple failure somewhere could cost users time and lose company money/goodwill. It's not terribly hard nor expensive.

Those are all much looser restrictions than routing traffic consistently to a cell

Route 53 latency based routing -> APIGW or ALB -> Lambda or Step Functions -> DDB Global Table.

No reserved capacity (pay for usage), so it works for boot strapping startups and provides superior resilience while being extremely simple to setup and involves almost zero maintenance or patching (even under the hug of death). I don’t understand settling for less (and taking longer and paying more for it).

How do you think people are going to learn this stuff if not by reading about it from architects who have done it?

This writeup seems like a useful contribution to spreading this knowledge that you think every engineer should, somehow, innately be born with, to those members of the development community who missed out on picking this stuff up in elementary school.

> architecting for this is not really "advanced, FAANG-only accessible methodology"

Sorry - where are you quoting this claim from?

The S in FAANG is for Slack.

My own words, but this is fairly trivial in the context of these massive companies with presumably PHDs working on their architecture.

I don't quite know what a PhD-grade architecture would look like, but this seems like a reasonabke one to me.

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